About Last Night is based on the 1986 film of the same title (with Demi Moore and Rob
Lowe) — which was based on the David Mamet play
Sexual Perversity in Chicago.

The Mamet influence is barely evident in either movie. The only similarity: All involve two
couples — one serious, one funny.

Kevin Hart and Regina Hall are the funny couple, who meet and have a one-night stand that turns
into a relationship filled with huge fights and bacchanalian reconciliations.

Michael Ealy and Joy Bryant play their serious friends, who meet and head toward something
serious: She moves into his apartment, and they’re officially a couple.

The test for a relationship is whether it can hold together when things start to go wrong. The
same could be said for a romantic movie. If you cast it right, courtship can be a lovely thing to
watch, especially with Bryant in the sympathetic role originally played by Moore. Like Moore,
Bryant shows a woman giving everything to a man who doesn’t fully appreciate her, even as she
persuades an audience to love her.

But breaking up is the hard part. After getting an audience to invest emotionally in a couple,
the screenplay must wrench them apart in a way that’s both believable and yet doesn’t undermine our
faith in them as a couple.

About Last Night makes the error of vagueness. Yes, we get the idea that Danny (Ealy)
feels trapped in domesticity, but we never see why. In the original
About Last Night, Lowe, playing the same character, screws up. He dumps Moore in a way
that borders on cruelty because he wants to see other women. But Ealy’s Danny is too nice a guy for
that, so the estrangement doesn’t make sense.

One could say that the 1986
About Last Night was about the corruptive influence of the promiscuous bar-scene life,
while the new one, albeit with some humor, endorses it as a prelude to a serious relationship. So
there’s no point of view, no right and no wrong — and no dramatic stakes.

The screenplay has a nice sense of the ways that couples can descend from snippiness into
arguing. And Hart is a fine comedic actor — funny but thinking and feeling, playing off the other
actors. He is well-paired with Hall, who matches him for comedy.

Still, what are we to make of a movie showing such blatant disrespect for dinner?

Yes, dinner. In an early scene, Debbie (Bryant) makes a nice meal, and Danny knocks it to the
floor so they can have sex on the table. Later, she makes another nice dinner, and they each have
one bite before running out to a party.